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Prose

Excerpt from Sula

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight
of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris
curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts;
ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks.
And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape
like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened
the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left
a smell of smoke behind.

It was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth
year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish,
frightened and bold — all at the same time.

In that mercury mood in July, Sula and Nel wandered
about the Bottom barefoot looking for mischief. They decided to
go down by the river where the boys sometimes swam. Nel waited on
the porch of 7 Carpenter's Road while Sula ran into the house to
go to the toilet. On the way up the stairs, she passed the kitchen
where Hannah sat with two friends, Patsy and Valentine. The two
women were fanning themselves and watching Hannah put down some
dough, all talking casually about one thing and another, and had
gotten around, when Sula passed by, to the problems of child rearing.

"They a pain."

"Yeh. Wish I'd listened to mamma. She told
me not to have 'em too soon."

"Any time atall is too soon for me."

"Oh, I don't know. My Rudy minds his daddy.
He just wild with me. Be glad when he growed and gone."

"Sure I do. But he still a pain. Can't
help loving your own child. No matter what they do."

"Well, Hester grown now and I can't say
love is exactly what I feel."

"Sure you do. You love her, like I love
Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference."

"Guess so. Likin' them is another thing."

"Sure. They different people, you know
..."

She only heard Hannah's words, and the pronouncement
sent her flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she stood at the
window fingering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye.
Nel's call floated up and into the window, pulling her away from
dark thoughts back into the bright, hot daylight.

/- - -/

Every now and then she looked around for tangible
evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies?
the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for
he had left nothing but his stunning absence. An absence so decorative,
so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever
endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent
presence.

The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the
door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on
his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of
his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing
of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if
she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the
contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving
the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of
rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When
he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes
and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because
of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things,
so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.

Then one day, burrowing in a dresser drawer,
she found what she had been looking for: proof that he had been
there, his driver's license. It contained just what she needed for
verification — his vital statistics: Born 1901, height 5'11",
weight 152 lbs., eyes brown, hair black, color black. Oh yes, skin
black. Very black. So black that only a steady careful rubbing with
steel wool would remove it, and as it was removed there was the
glint of gold leaf and under the gold leaf the cold alabaster and
deep, deep down under the cold alabaster more black only this time
the black of warm loam.

But what was this? Albert Jacks? His name was
Albert Jacks? A. Jacks. She had thought it was Ajax. All those years.
Even from the time she walked by the pool hall and looked away from
him sitting astride a wooden chair, looked away to keep from seeing
the wide space of intolerable orderliness between his legs; the
openness that held no sign, no sign at all, of the animal that lurked
in his trousers; looked away from the insolent nostrils and the
smile that kept slipping and falling, falling, falling so she wanted
to reach out with her hand to catch it before it fell to the pavement
and was sullied by the cigarette butts and bottle caps and spittle
at his feet and the feet of other men who sat or stood around outside
the pool hall, calling, singing out to her and Nel and grown women
too with lyrics like pig meat and brown sugar and
jailbait and O Lord, what have I done to deserve the wrath,
and Take me, Jesus, I have seen the promised land, and Do,
Lord, remember me in voices mellowed by hopeless passion into
gentleness. Even then, when she and Nel were trying hard not to
dream of him and not to think of him when they touched the softness
in their underwear or undid their braids as soon as they left home
to let the hair bump and wave around their ears, or wrapped the
cotton binding around their chests so the nipples would not break
through their blouses and give him cause to smile his slipping,
falling smile, which brought the blood rushing to their skin. And
even later, when for the first time in her life she had lain in
bed with a man and said his name involuntarily or said it truly
meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not
his at all.

Sula stood with a worn slip of paper in her
fingers and said aloud to no one, "I didn't even know his name.
And if I didn't know his name, then there is nothing I did know
and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted
was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he
was making love to a woman who didn't even know his name.

"When I was a little girl the heads of
my paper dolls came off, and it was a long time before I discovered
that my own head would not fall off if I bent my neck. I used to
walk around holding it very stiff because I thought a strong wind
or a heavy push would snap my neck. Nel was the one who told me
the truth. But she was wrong. I did not hold my head stiff enough
when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls.

"It's just as well he left. Soon I would
have torn the flesh from his face just to see if I was right about
the gold and nobody would have understood that kind of curiosity.
They would have believed that I wanted to hurt him just like the
little boy who fell down the steps and broke his leg and the people
think I pushed him just because I looked at it."

Holding the driver's license she crawled into
bed and fell into a sleep full of dreams of cobalt blue.

When she awoke, there was a melody in her head
she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. "Perhaps
I made it up," she thought. Then it came to her — the
name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many
times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, "There
aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are.
I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are."
She lay down again on the bed and sang a little wandering tune made
up of the words I have sung all the songs all the songs I have
sung all the songs there are until, touched by her own lullaby,
she grew drowsy, and in the hollow of near-sleep she tasted the
acridness of gold, left the chill of alabaster and smelled the dark,
sweet stench of loam.